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After thoroughly enjoying my time in Vietnam, I headed off on an eneventful bus ride to Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia. The city suprised me by being a normal big city, and even more suprising, I learned from the people I was traveling with that there is more American food available in a Cambodian grocery store than in London. However, before I explain the places I visited in Phnom Penh, a brief history lesson on Cambodia might help explain the two main museums.

Phnom Penh

Peter Wyant
2007-02-05 21:19:23

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After thoroughly enjoying my time in Vietnam, I headed off on an eneventful bus ride to Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia. The city suprised me by being a normal big city, and even more suprising, I learned from the people I was traveling with that there is more American food available in a Cambodian grocery store than in London. However, before I explain the places I visited in Phnom Penh, a brief history lesson on Cambodia might help explain the two main museums.

After a civil war that ended in 1975, Cambodia suffered under the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge regime, which stayed in power until 1979. Under the leadership of the paranoid Pol Pot, the goal of the Khmer Rouge was to "turn the clock back to year zero" and instate a rural utopia consisting of small villages that were filled with peasant farmers. To achieve this goal, immediately after assuming power, the military depopulated every city, by forcing the people to small villages to work on farms. To further achieve this idyllic communist utopia, the Khmer Rouge also banned money, killed all civil servants and slaughtered anybody with an education, as signified by speaking a second language, being a monk or merely wearing glasses. On top of all this, the Khmer Rouge did not hesitate to kill anybody that perceived to be a threat to the regime. After four years under the Khmer Rouge an estimated 2 million Cambodians, or roughly 20% of the population, were dead from: starvation (a number of severe famines spread throughout the country, while the government kept exporting rice to China to purchase weapons), disease (people were starving and all the doctors and nurses had been killed) or killed directly by the government.

The governement slaughtered staggering numbers of people because Pol Pot was terrified of "enemies within" burrowing into the organization/revolution and preventing utopia ideal. Many victimes were killed straight away, but most were processed through various facilities where ...